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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29625840">On Fire</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/AddyPlantagenet/pseuds/AddyPlantagenet'>AddyPlantagenet</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Hastings Chronicles [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Bridgerton (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 18:28:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,059</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29625840</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/AddyPlantagenet/pseuds/AddyPlantagenet</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Continuation in the AU "Full of Grace" Universe.  She's awake now and the work begins. The Rating bump is for the later chapters.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Daphne Bridgerton/Simon Basset, Simon Basset &amp; Daphne Bridgerton</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Hastings Chronicles [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2161536</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>107</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>On Fire</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>On Fire</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>Give me one more time around, give me one more chance to see</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Give me everything you are give me one more chance to be near you</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When everything inside me looks like everything I hate,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>You are the hope I have for change, you are the only chance I’ll take</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When I’m on fire when you’re near me, I’m on fire when you speak,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I’m on fire burning at these mysteries.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>                                                                -On Fire (Switchfoot)</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>He is still there when she wakes. He watches the light change on her face as the sun rises. Watches her frown and then slowly open her eyes. Her reaction to seeing him sitting in that chair fully clothed and watching her is… not encouraging. At first she jerks up right before she remembers her composure and slinks away from him a distance. Her expression is a study in bemusement anxious and wary yet hopeful. She’s waiting for him to say something but he isn’t sure that he can manage it. There are a thousand things he wants to say and he can feel them all getting jumbled in his mouth. If he opens it now he’s not sure what will come out. They sit, silent and unmoving and he wonders for a moment if anything could possibly be worth this excruciating awkwardness.</p><p>“Simon?” her tone is soft and tentative but the grip on her blanket has her knuckles bloodless. “Is there something you wanted?”</p><p>“How are you feeling?” he hears himself ask and immediately he regrets it. <em>How is she feeling</em>, as if he isn’t aware that she cried herself to sleep because of him.</p><p>She swallows nervously before giving him the fake smile that he’s been subjected to for the past few weeks. “I am well enough.” She replies sitting up fully to lean back against the headboard. “Are you sending me somewhere?”</p><p>“What?” he shakes his head in confusion. Sending her somewhere? Did she really think he was that cold blooded?</p><p>Her eyes are fixed straight ahead as she begins fussing with her hair, trying to pat down the wild locks and strands that have broken free during the night. “I hoped that you’d at least wait until the season was fully over. It would look less awkward.”</p><p>“I’m not sending you away.”</p><p>“You aren’t?” she looks up at him “Are you leaving then? Please, I beg of you wait until the season is over. I know that you are anxious to be away but-”</p><p>“Daphne, no.” He closes his eyes a moment and takes a deep breath. Jesus this wasn’t going well. “I… I wanted to speak to you.”</p><p>“I’m not sure what there is to say anymore, you’ve been clear and consistent with your demands and expectations.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“I am… I am not with child, so we don’t need to pretend anymore. You said-”</p><p>“I know what I said.” He snaps, sick to death of her using his words as a shield against him. “Will you please just listen.”</p><p>“Alright.” She goes back to silently watching him, her fingers laced, and her face composed despite the resigned sadness in her eyes. She is trying hard to be sophisticated. The season’s incomparable, the diamond of the ton. But he’s heard her grief, and he’s seen the tears on her cheeks. And for all her composure her eyes are pleading with him not to drag this out and make a spectacle. To leave her some dignity. To leave her with<em> something.</em></p><p>“The other night, you wanted to understand why I made the choice I made.”</p><p>“Yes, I did.”</p><p>“Yes.” He falters, watching her face. “My father-”</p><p>“-was a brute.”</p><p>“Yes.” It was so rare to hear it spoken so bluntly. She wasn’t going to encourage him not to speak ill of the dead, or let bygones be bygones. “I told you that he didn’t care about me or my mother but it was… it was more than that. He was a man used to getting what he wanted. Used to having control over his life. He wanted an heir and he killed my mother getting one. It was his prerogative to risk or exhaust her life to get what was owed him by law. He never felt any guilt or misgivings about that. But the heir he received wasn’t… wasn’t what he wanted.”</p><p>“What do you mean?”</p><p>“I… when I was a child I had difficulty speaking. I had a stammer.”</p><p>“I see.”</p><p>“You don’t but I imagine one day you will. It’s better now, but I didn’t speak at all until I was four. My father was not pleased with that. He wanted to beat my voice out of me. When I spoke it came out in fits and starts, I was barely decipherable. He was horrified. He’d sired an imbecile.”</p><p>Her entire body stiffens in outrage but she keeps silent.</p><p>“He left me at Clyvedon and returned here, to Hastings House. He never wrote to me, he never visited me. He… he told people that I’d died.”</p><p>“Simon,”</p><p>“Don’t. I haven’t finished and this… this is hard enough as it is.” He can still feel that loneliness.  The awareness that he was unloved and unwanted. The crushing defeat of having failed before he’d even had a chance to try.  That shame and loneliness is the first emotion he remembers feeling. He takes another breath and focuses on her small pale hands on the velvet coverlet, and the wedding ring that she wears on her finger. He wants to reach for them and the comfort that he knows they would bring but he can’t. Not yet. A touch from her would shatter him and he has to finish. “He refused to acknowledge that I was alive because to him, the fact that I was alive was more of an afront than if I’d died with my mother.  It was Lady Danbury to came to find me. She… she was good to me. She didn’t look at me like a pitiable freak whenever I spoke. I wrote him letters like a fool to let him know how well I was doing. How much I’d improved. He never opened them. He was angry and insulted that I insisted on proving my existence.”</p><p>“You don’t-”</p><p>“I do. He told me so himself. We Bassets are very good at being ‘clear and consistent about our demands and expectations.’” He knows that she was hoping to give him something to cling to, some hope of a misunderstanding. He watching that futile argument die on her lips. And the growing horror on her face as he continues. “I came to see him, to inquire as to why he’d never written me back. Lady Danbury was there with me. But when he looked at me I froze… all those months of hard work and nothing. He said that the fact I was alive was an insult enough without forcing him to witness it. He said he would deal with me as he did with my useless mother; pretend that we never existed. He wouldn’t pay for my education or enroll me in school. He was certain that I’d embarrass him further.</p><p>That was when I decided that no matter what I would never marry and I would never have children. I was ten years old. I dedicated myself to disproving everything he thought about me. To mastering everything he didn’t think I was capable of. He didn’t want me in school so I enrolled myself. I studied and worked hard so he’d have no choice but to leave me there. So he couldn’t force me back to Clyvedon without explaining himself to the ton. I proved what I already knew to be true. He still didn’t write to me, he wouldn’t acknowledge me in public. I went to Cambridge and met your brother. I made a name for myself that had nothing to do with my father. My father who’d wished me dead my whole life. I hated that man. I hated him like poison. I made that vow because I couldn’t bear the idea of all his cruelty all his dominating  arrogant selfishness being rewarded. My mother gave her life’s blood so he could have a child and he didn’t even have the decency to respect her sacrifice.”</p><p>“Simon you can’t think that I would care about that. About how you speak.” Her voice is so soft and comforting and still it fills him with dread.</p><p>“Why not? Why should you have been any different than anyone else? Than him? You wanted to be an admired triumph. A standard of achievement for your sisters and all of society. Why would you want a defective husband? He was my father and it was all he cared about it. I was his only son and he discarded me like a malfunctioning toy when I was four. He didn’t give a damn about how it made me feel to be abandoned and reviled by him, trapped inside myself with a mouth that didn’t work. All he cared about was his own pride. How he would be seen with a defective heir.”</p><p>“Stop saying that word.”</p><p>“It’s what I was to him. He was my only family and he wanted me dead so he could pretend I didn’t exist. That I’d never existed. I wasn’t good enough for him. My stammer… you don’t even know what it sounds like. It really was true what I told the Queen. I’ve never liked talking. Never. People always thought it was because I thought myself above the company. Now you know the truth.”</p><p>There are tears brimming in her eyes as she slowly shifts closer to him. There is sadness in her face but no pity. It is the lack of pity that gives him the courage to reach out and finally take her hands in his. Her answering grip is instant and solid. It takes him by surprise. She’s never held his hand that tightly before. He can’t stop staring at the contrast of the two of them. Light and dark, big and small. She is holding onto him.</p><p>“I was at peace with my vow before I met you. You were the only thing that made me wonder if living to spite him was worth it. I hated him for so long. The only thing I’ve hated more is this distance between us. Your tears. The only thing I wanted more than his disappointment was a life with you. I’d rather be your husband than his son but… life as his son hasn’t left me fit to be your husband. I don’t know how to give you what you need. I don’t know how to do this. And if I try only to fail, to prove him right, I don’t know how I’d stand it.”</p><p>“I imagine we both have some work to do there. I don’t really know how to be your wife.”</p><p>The small laugh surprises him, but it shouldn’t. She would see the other side and give him the comfort of a different perspective.  She always did make him feel less alone. She always could make him smile.</p><p>“But I want to. I want to be your wife.”</p><p>“Even now?”</p><p>“Even now. Especially now. I love you Simon, I love all of you. Whatever your struggles, whatever your flaws, real or imagined they are part of you. What you’ve told me, it only makes me want your happiness even more.”</p><p>“You already make me happy.”</p><p>“No. Truly happy. I want to give you what you need. I want to make sure you never feel alone again.”</p><p>“Daphne,” he can only breathe out her name past his clenched throat. He wants to say more but his mouth will not work, he knows it. Instead he presses fervent kisses on those small hands, their soft palms and slender strong fingers.</p><p>“Simon, I… I want to try again."</p><p>He lifts his head to look into her eyes. Into that beautiful, open loving face. “I want that as well. I don’t want to be alone anymore. I’m so sick of being alone.”</p><p>Those perfect hands are on his face now. She’s pulling him closer until she can press her forehead against his. Just that, just that touch alone and he can breathe easily for the first time in days.</p>
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